


Dil's Bad Day

by transdimensional_void



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF), The Sims (Video Games)
Genre: Fluff, Other, The Sims, squid - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 19:57:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3908647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transdimensional_void/pseuds/transdimensional_void
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dil Howlter is dissatisfied with his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dil's Bad Day

One day, Dil Howlter was home all alone, and he was in a very bad mood. A terrible mood. A monumentally-displeased-about-the-state-of-affairs kind of mood. His party had been unsuccessful. Erica Pendelton downright hated him. Summer Holiday wouldn’t answer his calls, and Preston Chapa had forgotten he even existed. And to top it all off, nothing good was on the penguin tv.

“What to do? What to do?” he muttered to himself, dropping the tv remote on the couch and sighing a gusty a sigh that ruffled his fringe.

He thought about maybe going outside and having a jog. Exercise was supposed to improve your mood, wasn’t it? But then he remembered what a lazy git he really was and that he would never in his life willingly do exercise.

“Maybe I should cook something,” he thought, and swinging his feet off the coffee table, he wandered into his kitchen. Five minutes later he found himself standing in front of the refrigerator, door in hand, staring at the food. Nothing looked good. He didn’t feel like heart cookies, or hamburger cake, and he knew that if he attempted scrambled eggs he’d probably just burn them again. He closed the refrigerator, and, shoulders slumped, trudged off toward his bedroom.

“Beep,” he heard from behind him.

“Great,” he muttered to himself. “Even my smoke alarm is mocking me now.”

He was about to continue on to his bedroom when the study door caught his eye. He tended to avoid the study, because the empty desk just reminded him of how badly he wanted a computer already. But, hey, with the crap mood he was in now, could he really feel any worse?

He crossed the hall, glancing out his porthole to see that outside everything looked sunny and cheerful — as if the whole world was completely indifferent to his misery — and pushed open the study door.

It was a rather bare room, furnished only with a desk and a single bookshelf. There wasn’t much to look at, and he was on the verge of leaving when he caught sight of a book that had fallen over at the end of one of the shelves. Of course, now even his books were rebelling against him.

Irritated, he stomped over and yanked it off the shelf, preparing to shove it into an empty slot, but then the cover caught his eye.

“One Thousand and One Amazing Squids!” it read, and “Full-Page Squid Photos of Exceptional Quality!” The cover itself was emblazoned with a gorgeous image of a pod of bright red squid floating in a deep-blue sea.

“Squids, eh…” For some reason he couldn’t quite explain, the thought of a book dedicated entirely to something as ridiculous as squid amused him. Without really even meaning to, he flipped the book open to the center page. It was a two-page spread of an old sketch, depicting someone’s idea of what a kraken might look like devouring a ship.

“Hey, look, someone who’s having an even worse day than me,” he thought to himself and then grinned, a little darkly.

He flipped the pages again and then had to stop and just stare for a moment. The page he’d turned to was another two-page spread, but this one showed a grouping of four tiny squid on a black background. Their skin was so delicate that you could see right through to the other side, but that wasn’t what had caught his eye. The little squid were glowing, blue and iridescent green, like tiny fairy lights flashing bravely against the deep, black of a nighttime ocean. Dil had never seen anything so beautiful or so wondrous in his life.

He chuckled to himself again. It was kind of silly, maybe, to feel so happy just looking at pictures of squid, but then again when he really paused to ponder it, the world was full of so many beautiful things that he was yet to see. Out there, in the depths of the ocean, were squid so small he would need a magnifying glass to see them. Somewhere in the middle of a rainforest were frogs of every color of the rainbow whose tiny bodies held enough poison to kill him twenty times over. And even here, in his own town, there were thousands of little things he may never see — a line of flowers in a box under a window, a child’s drawing hanging on a refrigerator, someone carefully writing out a letter to a dear friend who lived far away — so many things that he didn’t see but that continued to be beautiful nonetheless.

Dil found that all of a sudden he was grinning. He carefully closed the book and then tucked it under his arm. He was going to keep it by his bed, where he could take a look at it any time he needed cheering up.

As he stepped out of the study and carefully pulled the door shut behind him, he glanced out the porthole again. The sun was still shining, but now the light didn’t seem quite so cold. Maybe he would go out for that jog. Maybe he would try calling Summer one more time. Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr as a gift for dil-howlters-squid-book


End file.
